pressible Teddy. "He never whips us, he
doesn't. He stands us on the floor sometimes, though," he added,
remembering the many times his own chubby legs had been seen to better
advantage on the school platform.

"That man," said Mrs. Grant, alluding to the teacher, "makes me
nervous. He is the most abstracted creature I ever saw in my life. It
is a wonder to me he doesn't walk straight into the river some day.
You'll meet him meandering along the street, gazing into vacancy, and
he'll never see you nor hear a word you say half the time."

"Yesterday," said Gordon, chuckling over the remembrance, "he came in
with a big piece of paper he'd picked up on the entry floor in one
hand and his hat in the other--and he stuffed his hat into the
coal-scuttle and hung up the paper on a nail as grave as you please.
Never knew the difference till Ned Slocum went and told him. He's
always doing things like that."

Keith had collected his books and now marched his brothers and sisters
off to school. Left alone with the baby, Mrs. Grant betook herself to
her work with a heavy heart. But a second interruption broke the
progress of her dish-washing.

"I declare," she said, with a surprised glance through the window, "if
there isn't that absent-minded schoolteacher coming through the yard!
What can he want? Dear me, I do hope Teddy hasn't been cutting capers
in school again."

For the teacher's last call had been in October and had been
occasioned by the fact that the irrepressible Teddy would persist in
going to school with his pockets filled with live crickets and in
driving them harnessed to strings up and down the aisle when the
teacher's back was turned. All mild methods of punishment having
failed, the teacher had called to talk it over with Mrs. Grant, with
the happy result that Teddy's behaviour had improved--in the matter of
crickets at least.

But it was about time for another outbreak. Teddy had been unnaturally
good for too long a time. Poor Mrs. Grant feared that it was the calm
before a storm, and it was with nervous haste that she went to the
door and greeted the young teacher.

He was a slight, pale, boyish-looking fellow, with an abstracted,
musing look in his large dark eyes. Mrs. Grant noticed with amusement
that he wore a white straw hat in spite of the season. His eyes were
directed to her face with his usual unseeing gaze.

"Just as though he was looking through me at something a thousand
miles away," said M